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One of the ways I evaluate whether I'm doing the *right* thing, or whether I think others are, is to check whether it is the kind of thing that one will never give up on. That's maybe a little hard to explain, but if one is following a path of purpose through one's life, it isn't a matter of trying this and that, starting things and failing, trying to guess what one should do, etc. Oh, one's activities might include all of those things, and it is quite noble to dare to take risks, to explore untried avenues, and to fail and keep going. But underneath it all there's something that won't fail. If you're doing what you're here to do, there is no failure. There is no way you can fail.
[ Inspiration | 2002-01-22 01:27 | | PermaLink ] More >
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Attention, you other News Log Owners/Editors/Authors, notice that when you enter a new article, you can also optionally put it in a supplemental category in addition to the categories in your own news log. The additional categories are the categories that appear as special interests in the Subjects section. So, if you use those categories, when appropriate, your articles will also appear in the corresponding Subjects section. It will also appear in the News Log that you see in the Resources section, which is a combination of anything that has categories for the Subjects sections. Makes sense?
[ NCN | 2002-01-20 18:25 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 There is a widespread myth underlying most media information, most analysis of the activities of governments and corporations, and most scientific debunking of anything unusual going on in the world. That is that most things are known by the public, and if anything unusual would be going on, we'd know about it. In other words, there are no conspiracies, no big things going on in secret, nothing much happening that isn't described in the official school textbooks and in the newspaper. The myth reasons that if any large number of people are expected to keep a secret, there will always be somebody who spills the beans. The problem is that this isn't true at all.
[ Patterns | 2002-01-17 19:43 | | PermaLink ] More >
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I hate monopolies. I have a lot of not very nice things to say about companies or governments that try to own and control the Internet, for example. Now, one of the companies that have been most successful in that regard is not Microsoft, but Verisign. I've never liked that company, but have found it hard to avoid as they methodically would buy up any competition. I was using Thawte for secure digital certificates, as they were the only competitor to Verisign, and much cheaper, but Verisign bought the company, and raised the prices instantly. I was using CyberCash for online credit card processing, but Verisign bought them. Verisign bought Network Solutions, who used to be the domain name monopoly, and their service dropped to even lower levels than before. I believe I've finally gotten all my domains trasferred elsewhere. Anyway, here is an article from business2.com about Stratton Sclavos who runs and owns most of Verisign.
[ Opinions | 2002-01-16 21:50 | | PermaLink ] More >
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On the road to creating a better civilization where we can experience unity and diversity, freedom and cooperation, where the world works for all of us - there are some key concepts that I think need to be re-framed and re-thought. One of them is the idea that a government, consisting of a few "representatives" of the people, is allowed to produce huge volumes of *law* that will regulate how people behave, and that somehow that is a good thing, a corner stone of civilization itself.
[ Thoughts | 2002-01-16 17:16 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 I always come back to *dialogue* as a central ingredient in creating a new civilization. That is, a space of mutual exploration where we can talk about what we're experiencing, without any need to judge each other. I particularly support dialogue as David Bohm described it. Several people have compiled excellent resources on dialogue. See Tony Judge's page at UIA and Heiner Benking's Open Forum page. And the people who introduced me to dialogue: Linda and Glenna at The Dialogue Group. Also, check out Deep Dialogue.
[ Diary | 2002-01-14 02:10 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 The term "post-modernism" has always confused me. Or, rather, I must admit that I never got a good definition. Now, researching it some more, the best explanation I can find is in these pages. Modernism was characterized by a belief that rational, orderly progress of one well-identified central metaphor, such as Science or Capitalism or Communism, was going to solve things. Post-modernism is the end of belief in any such absolute truths; replaced with a sense that everything is relative; there are no universal answers or agreements; culture just fragments into a playful celebration of chaos. We're surfing across multiple paradigms, without any of them being the obvious RIGHT one. Mostly it means that Science and your local Political Paradigm have been deposed as gods of your world. You can make up the truth as well as they can.
[ Patterns | 2002-01-06 22:18 | | PermaLink ] More >
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Having just spent a couple of weeks in Denmark, I notice how many things one only picks up by being immersed in a place, by being there. I'm usually kind of obsessive about figuring out certain things in advance when I travel somewhere. Like, I don't really go anywhere without being sure I have mobile phone service and a way of connecting up my laptop. In part because I want my customers to keep paying me as if I'm working, even though I'm on vacation. And I usually end up fairly well prepared on that kind of things, but only after time-consuming research. Things that might be quite simple when I'm there can be rather hard to figure out remotely, as one doesn't necessarily know where to start.
[ Thoughts | 2002-01-06 12:05 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 I'm having a good time on vacation in Denmark with my family. Although most of us are born here we're not quite used to the cold, though. But it is very nice to see the snow again, and my kids have been busy making snowmen and throwing snowballs.
[ Diary | 2001-12-22 01:14 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 I sometimes get a kick out of the experience of reading things I myself have written a long time ago. I usually can't quite appreciate my own writing, unless I somehow run into it accidentally later on, and I can sort of read it as somebody else might. And sometimes even learn something. Anyway, I was just reading the news that the google search engine now has archived the last 20 years of UseNet postings. Which is bound to include many stupid discussions I've had with people over time, so I went to check. And, indeed, there are things there that I wouldn't particularly want to be known for today, but also good things I might have said. Rather randomly, below is a piece about leadership, which I wrote in an answer to somebody else's question back in 1996.
[ Thoughts | 2001-12-11 23:38 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 I'm reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It is sort of a thriller about secret codes and stuff, taking place both in WWII and today. Anyway, one of the recurring themes is about finding patterns in apparent randomness. *Information* is essentially the stuff that is different within a volume of data. If I say AAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAA, there isn't a whole lot of information. It is a bunch of As and a B. The B is what sticks out, of course. There is no information if everything is the same all the time, or if it is just the same repetitive pattern. Information is conveyed when something different takes place, which somebody can make sense out of.
Through intelligent analysis one might find patterns of information where the untrained eye wouldn't expect or notice any. An example from the book: a secret installation that is working on breaking codes, using a certain kind of machines, has hired mainly women who are taller than the norm, because of the way the machines are constructed, as they need to be able to reach to the top of them to change the paper. Somebody who had access to personnel records and were analyzing them might notice the height variance. That is information. It points to a deeper pattern. A smart intelligence person would notice that variation and would investigate it further to find out what it meant.
[ Patterns | 2001-12-11 04:27 | | PermaLink ] More >
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Most things I seem to care about are sharable. There's a certain enjoyment in sharing. Sharing an experience, a story, something one has learned, a piece of good information, a better way of doing things, a spiritual revelation, sexual ecstasy, whatever it may be. Nothing is quite so much fun if it can't be shared. Even if it is a deeply personal experience. Then maybe you'll share your subsequently different outlook on life, or you'll go around emanating a different vibe.
I'd also go as far as saying that in most fields it is good that something is sharable, and bad when something isn't sharable. In fields such as technology, communication, information, politics, art, or just about anything else I can think of - if something useful and desirable is sharable, it can benefit many people, and possibly the world. If something considered useful and desirable is not sharable, but is only available for the select few, under very limited circumstances, it is probably a waste of resources and the world is bereft of a potential positive benefit.
[ Patterns | 2001-12-07 23:46 | | PermaLink ] More >
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What I am looking for is a better global brain - a better way for us to be connected together, where our collective intelligence will tend to emerge.
I'm looking for a structure of inter-connectedness where more connections add up to more intelligence, rather than more confusion. It would become better when more people participate. Increased diversity would increase the rate of evolution, and make the whole system more intelligent and more stable.
[ Projects | 2001-12-06 22:30 | | PermaLink ] More >
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Seems like e-mail has existed for 30 years. I was just enjoying an article at NY Times (sorry, they require a one-time registration). And, well, I haven't had e-mail for quite that long - only for around 19 years, but I still felt a certain nostalgia about it. The first time I had a computer that was *connected* was in 1982 and it was an ancient Z80 computer with 16k of memory, connected with a 75/1200 modem to the experimental Danish Teletext service. The year later I had an IBM PC, with a 300bps modem, and a subscription to The Source. Even connecting with that was rather cumbersome, and cost me around $40 per hour at the time. And at first I didn't really know anybody else who had e-mail, so I can't say I used that part much for a while. It was a couple of years after that that e-mail started replacing faxes as my way of staying in touch with friends around the world.
[ Stories | 2001-12-06 16:43 | | PermaLink ] More >
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For those of you who have your own news log here, I'm adding some possibly more convenient way of doing links. As it has you been, a URL you typed in would become highlighted and clickable. But some URLs are ugly, and you would probably rather want to have a piece of descriptive text be clickable. You could do that if you know HTML, but here is a slightly more user-friendly way. Let's say I want to link to the URL [link] and I want it to have the text "Common Dreams" be what is clickable. I can type it in this special way: Common Dreams and it will show up like this: Common Dreams I.e. it is a clickable link, with a readable text, and it will also open up in a new window, so one doesn't lose one's place in your news log.
[ Information | 2001-12-02 16:30 | | PermaLink ] More >
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I'm having a conversation with Mark Smollin about principles and systems for a better democracy. Experimentally, there are postings in the bulletin board under the "Social System Design" subject in the Subjects pages. We met in the Conscious Evolution Gateway educational program that Barbara Marx-Hubbard is running. Anyway, creating a better and more direct democracy has always been something I'd like to do. With the Internet connecting most of us, it ought to be possible to come up with systems for connecting us together in such a way that our collective will can be better facilitated. Seems like the old Industrial Age methods for "governing" society need to go.
[ Projects | 2001-12-01 06:00 | | PermaLink ] More >
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It has been several years since e-mail stopped being a useful medium for me. Now it is mostly an ongoing source of guilt for me, because of all the needles I don't notice in the loads of hay stacks I get every day. I still get 5-600 e-mail messages per day. Amongst them, I'm sure, many gold nuggets of information, as well as important personal messages I really should be attending to. But in the mass of everything else, and by the sheer volume of it, it is a matter of complete luck whether I happen to notice some of the stuff I ought to notice. What isn't working for me is the linear, unstructured nature of e-mail.
[ Opinions | 2001-11-26 05:22 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 That's actually a real spider. Of the family Theridion grallator, commonly known as the "Hawaian Happyface Spiders". They're very small, were first discovered in 1973, and only seem to be found on Hawaii. See more pictures:
[link]
[ Information | 2001-11-20 04:44 | | PermaLink ] More >
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Here's some stuff about the phenomenon of weblogs:
[link]
You know, News Logs are pretty much the same thing as weblogs or blogs. They're called different things in different incarnations.
As he says, they're Personal Web Publishing Communities. He also says that this is relational writing. Almost everything relates to something else, somewhere else. This is a different kind of writing that hasn't really existed before.
[ Information | 2001-11-18 04:02 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Since I'm going back home to Denmark for christmas with my family, after not having been there for many years, I got the idea of looking on the Internet for people I used to know in Denmark, just to see what came up and what has become of people. Like, my childhood friends, people I went to school with, etc. And it is sort of a weird experience. Some people are easily found and turn out to be doctors or engineers or business consultants or musicians. Some of them I can find, but only in a more obscure context. Like, one was looking for parts for restoring an antique car at some point, another posted a comment about a movie, and another posted a recipe for sausage stew.
[ Thoughts | 2001-11-17 17:57 | | PermaLink ] More >
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